The horrors of World War I shocked Europe to its core, bringing with it a series of dramatic changes to everyday life. Nowhere was this clearer than in the art world, as the classical forms and techniques gave way to radical new movements like Surrealism and Dada. The latter is key because it was a springboard for up-and-coming artists like Marcel Janco.

Born Marcel Hermann Iancu in 1895, he grew up in Bucharest as the oldest child of a Jewish middle-class family. After studying under the Romanian painter Iosif Iser, Janco met a group of young artists, including Tristan Tzara and Clara Haskil. Around the start of World War I, Janco traveled to Switzerland and studied architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It was in Zurich that Janco, Tzara, and other artists formed a society at the Cabaret Voltaire, beginning the foundation of Dadaism.

Janco eventually abandoned the Dada movement and returned to Romania, where he became an architect and the editor of a radical art magazine called Contimporanul. However, Janco's status as a Jew ran up against the rising tide of anti-Semitism and fascism during the 1920s and he was forced to resettle in British Palestine. He continued to produce art while in exile and later became one of the first settlers in the new state of Israel. Janco redeveloped an abandoned village called Ein Hod into an artistic commune in 1953 and later founded a genuine Israeli art movement called New Horizons.

At the start of his career, Marcel Janco was trained to work with the Post-Impressionist style that was the standard for art in Europe. He drew upon the Futurism of later years in his architecture, pushing for more modern lines, but in his art, he was drawn (like other European artists) toward the popular appeal of African tribal art and primitivism. This led to his work in Dada, where he explored modern sympathies in abstract and provocative forms. Following World War II, Janco's style shifted toward the Holocaust as a common subject and he rebranded his abstract style toward an Israeli sensibility.

To appreciate the style that Janco brought to Dada, we can look at a small but iconic work, which was the design of a book cover. The book in question is called La Premiere Aventure Celeste de Mr. Antipyrine, being the script of an "anti-play" written by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Influenced by the Dadaist rebellion, Tzara wrote a play that broke with theatrical conventions. To give it a proper platform, Janco designed this cover, which challenges the audience from the start. The crooked letters are arranged into a square, but the text wraps to fit the square instead of supporting the text's readability. The font itself is inelegant, tapping into the primitive spirit that Janco enjoyed working into his pieces.

To see more works by Marcel Janco, you can visit the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Ein Hod Artists' Village.

Image by MCAD Library on Flickr